That's what confuses me, a bit. Consider just as a hypothetical that Facebook is the single most unethical company on earth. Just as an example, whether you agree with it or not. I still wouldn't necessarily agree with what's being asked of them, to actively disallow political ads with lies. I think there's a good case to be made for just not having political ads (because of all the reasons you'd expect)... but I can understand having them, too, and it's a bit weird to me as someone who doesn't like a lot of what FB does to see the politicians die on the hill of "you must fact check everything"
It’s not weird at all, it’s a power grab. The politicians want to use social media as an excuse to become arbiters of the truth.
It’s repulsive and short-sighted, it appears to me they have forgotten or disregarded the old adage to not claim a new power you wouldn’t trust your opponents with.
“The truth” as applied to the realm of politics is very often something of substantial controversy and disagreement.
Asking a corporation to be in charge of arbitrating those disagreements doesn’t seem like the end game these politicians are actually pursuing here. Instead my interpretation of their motivation is to silence their opposition.
They are trying to setup a system where they are gatekeepers of these political disagreements, ignoring the fact that the same system will almost certainly be weaponized against them.
For what it’s worth I’m on the same “side” as these politicians for many issues, I just feel like they are playing a dangerous game here.
For nearly a decade, Donald Trump said Obama was not born in America, despite that being objectively false. Is that a position that shouldn't be silenced? What value does that objectively false assertion add to society? In 2016, pro-Trump ads targeted black voters with ads indicating the wrong day to go vote, with the goal of suppressing the black vote. What value did those objectively false assertions add to society. Why shouldn't they be silenced?
I can't understand how anyone thinks this is a reasonable argument after even ten seconds of thought, and yet it shows up reliably in every conversation on this topic.
We're talking about setting rules that span literally _billions_ of conversations. Taking fully for granted the notion that there are facts that are objective, 100% knowable facts: The question isn't about how the system handles obviously false or obviously true statements, it's how it handles everything on the margin. There were tons of things that were considered conspiracy theories that we now consider clear fact: people like you would have been the ones saying "of course we shouldn't allow people to claim the CIA is drugging and torturing and raping children"[1] in America in the 1950s, or "of course we shouldn't allow people to claim the government is euthanizing the disabled"[2] in 1930s Germany or any number of "obviously false" things that were very much true.
I have no reason to believe your particular example falls into that category, but the sweeping claim that arbitrating political facts is trivial is profoundly ignorant of even a tiny bit of history.
There are literally billions of ways that a factory could poison the drinking water with toxic byproducts from their production process. Obviously a community will be significantly harmed if their drinking water is poisoned, but the community also benefits from the profits generated by the factory, so regulators set thresholds that limit harm to the community while facilitating commerce. If the product is too toxic to meet those thresholds, then the factory should stop production and find less harmful ways to make a profit.
Facebook is arguing for the right to poison the well with a literally unlimited volume of toxic disinformation, rather than figure out a way to reduce if not eliminate that harm. Perhaps they limit the number of political ads that any single account can view to some small number. Perhaps they can only fact-check ads on topics that reach a certain view-count level. Or if it's too difficult of an engineering problem for Facebook to not poison the well, then they can stop hosting political ads.
Facebook is already arbitrating the truth. If you share a link or post an ad, it can be automatically annotated by an "independent third party fact checker", which they have a few of. But if it's an ad that is specifically from a political candidate, there is no fact checking done. Of course, these ads are mixed into your news feed with just a small "Sponsored" note.
If Facebook had not started its fact checking system nobody would be asking it to fact check political ads now.
